 It's been a while since I've been up here. It's been about two years. And I just want to thank you all for being here. What a great vibe we have going this particular residency. And that's due to everyone's openness and acquisitiveness and just humanity. So I'm just really grateful to be a part of this project we have together. And language is a project, too, that we're all a part of. Did it make a sound? It did, right? Not out of my mind. All right. Did it make another sound? So in honor of that work, I'm also going to read some new work. It's not super new, but it's all written. Almost everything I'm going to read tonight has been written since I was last at the podium. And in what's been a trend, it's work that is hybrid. It's both prose and poetry, nonfiction and poetry, and nonfiction poetry. And this book is called With and of the Arrow, and it's forthcoming from Tupelo Press, my press. And the title refers to what you think it does, except the arrow. Rather than gun violence, I think I'm thinking about violence long term that we are with and we are of it. And it's really not coming down. It's complicating matters, I'm hoping. Well, these are problems that we're having that I've been thinking about a lot because I live in Sandy Hook. One of the essays in this book was my experience of the day of the shooting. I'm not reading from that tonight. But it catalyzed and continued a conversation I'd been having with myself over a long period of time about the role of violence and the role of art and the role of parenting in my life and also then looking at models of other. You know, people have always parented in violent times. So it's just a fascinating little nexus, I think, a little spot to look at. And Plath, Sylvia Plath is one of the confessional poets. And she got a little heat for using personal material. It seems a little quaint now to us, but at one point it wasn't all right. But she talked about how that personal material needs to find its relevance in a larger world stage or it doesn't work. So that's what I'm testing, like the relevance of my personal experience against historical trends and the history of violence in particular and the history of art. And so with that, I start with an of the arrow. What I'm planning to do is read you the front material of the book, the introduction, the epigraph, the opening poem or two. Palms from the middle and the end of the book, not too many, maybe five altogether. Not too many poems. Everyone has to apologize when they start talking about poetry, so not too many poems. And then at the end, the closing couple of sections of the last essay that closes the collection. So it'll be interesting too. I'm testing it out to see, does the book actually work where better than where we all test whether our work works than here? So the book begins with, I was just discussing the various ways people pronounce Ellen Cissou's name. She's a French, she's actually an Algerian French writer and theorist. And she, this epigraph is her description of a Rembrandt painting. The ox is beautiful. The ox shines in the darkness, where, back of shop, cellar, tomb, this ox is a gigantic ingot, gigantic ingot of flesh. The ox is bound, the ox is nude. Who are we contemplating, Samson's truth or Rembrandt's? The blind, the freed, the powerful slaughtered, the gazed upon, who by their magnificent helplessness fills us with wonder. The vanquished sparkles, vanquished but strong. Nothing less realistic to paint this with what admiration, what love. The ox is hurled to the bottom and there are no angels. The huge body is sideways. Everything adds to the impression that someone has left it all alone. All of a sudden I see it's about our captivity. So that's sort of foregrounds everything I'm thinking about in the book. I'm sorry, it's so heavy, but at least the weather's changing so somebody agrees with me. So this is the introduction to the collection. Before getting to my desk. Before getting to my desk this morning, I've woken to the back of Luke, that's my youngest son, back of Luke's spine in blue light and understood for the first time that that is the image I have been dreaming of after working the eye entirely out of a poem that didn't need it. The poem has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the cataract over a saint's eye as Fra Angelico finished painting it in fresco 500 years ago. Everything to do with what to tell Mary she's getting into when the angel comes to tell her she'll bear the child of God. There's some blue light involved, a bent and sleeping spine, some lucky rainfall on the day of his birth. Before getting to my desk this morning I have crafted a paper grocery bag, thank goodness paper grocery bags still exist into a costume for Luke for school, fastening it with butterfly clips. What are those he asked when I said the two unexpected words together? Restore me to the wonder of anything named, what loves Jesus might say. Then I showed him its shape was like a butterfly rather than explaining it is just a metal clasp that opens between thumb and forefinger. I suggested we use them rather than taping so that it could be easily removed for sitting, for reading, for recess, he agreed. Then I cut from the bottom plastic sheeting of a reusable grocery bag, the kind that stands straight up using this sturdy plastic on the bottom. One round nose and two droopy triangular ears. I taped all three to the face and sideburn area and stood at the bus explaining that he was stick dog, a semi obscure cartoon character some children know and some don't. It's about our captivity. Before getting to my desk this morning I have read a beautiful poem by the Hungarian poet Miklos Radnadi who died in a ditch while performing forced labor during World War II but whose notebook of poems was found upon exhumation in the raincoat that covered his body. A poem that contains lines about the end of summer bathing in the sun and a pain that wanders around but you start again as if you had wings. The notebook nestled in consolation next to his dead body for over a year before it was found. Before getting to my desk this morning my window has reminded me by its frame of the contrasts of a Mark Rothko painting available in natures, browns and blues and my dreams have been filled with the strange creatures that inhabit the canvases of Arshile Gorky especially those with names like tracking down guiltless doves. Who? What hunter tracks down guiltless doves? I think it before I can stop myself. Start again as if you had wings says Miklos. Before my desk calls the purple irises have sprung up. Lovely weeds that must have something tasteless at their heart for the deer have left them. And the flowering pear tree that snowed petals all last week down on us as we went from the car to the house to the car to the house to soccer to baseball to band and back again readies itself to rain pollen next. Before I get to my desk a bird of the same type that is dead near our tiny fish pond has visited the dead one's body. Don't talk about it my oldest son says. Worried my youngest will notice. As oldest notes he must bring his trombone home today or miss the performance. Don't show him it's too sad. Later stick dogs will not see it. With my oldest I hold myself back from telling the story someone told me recently about the poet Robert Desnos saving a whole truck load of Jews from the Holocaust inspiring each of them to recite a poem allowed to him until the guard could no longer see them as he'd been trained to as inhuman but as human fulfilling this fundamental function of reciting words even unto what was surely oblivion. Could they be shot after such a thing though the ditch had called to them. These ones were saved but me closest widow had book not man afterwards. Hear me close again. All this could happen. The moon is round today. Don't walk past me friend. I save these stories for a day my oldest can hear them but when is that day? Soon I fear or worse already past. In a way I would not have picked for him. Another story has already been told and he's heard it. At my desk I wonder how stick dog is faring in his classroom. Perhaps the best moment of my life past this morning when I held the two tines of the butterfly clip in my hand above his small back one hand on his neck him saying a little tighter a little looser. Start again as if you had wings. Yes. How do essays and poems talk to each other? Do they sing one to the other as I did in my pew those years ago younger than my son? A call in response that became marrow and bone. The essay tells me from the Latin to try. The poem says sing, make. What would a trying song be? A making try? We are with and we are of the arrow. Would Sisu have me make something? Would Sisu enact in me the slaughter? All is slaughter and prayer. And yet before I get to my desk the world is opening. Why go to my desk at all? All this could happen me close whispers to me looking up from his shovel, touching the pocket where the poem is stored is safe. The moon is round today. So that's the opening of the collection. And essays and poems follow it. So you can see there's a mixing right of historical ideas, art historical ideas and then personal kind of confessional work. This poem that goes along with it is that opens the collection is called On Slaughter and Praying so it goes along with that essay. And it's about this thing we're having where we have bears near the bus stop. Maybe other people have experienced this with their children but it's a little nerve-racking the bears are at the bus stop. So that's also complicated. I'll tell you, I might read this poem twice but now I'm gonna tell you they're bears at the bus stop. And this one particular bear, one of my friend's daughters got off the bus as she got off the bus and was walking up the hill her phone, my friend's phone was ringing and neighbor was saying there's a bear and when they looked out as Quinny came up the stairs they didn't see the bear but they saw the upended trash can. So, On Slaughter and Praying. Let me slight up the hill of it. See enough to know. Say, I know you well enough. Say into the ear of its marrow distance. Yes, yellow for eyes. Yes, nose kin to mine. Let me slight my faded ashy. Read like in winter. The end is ugly, I know. The end is not what it wanted. Up the hill of it into something resembling knowledge. The small girl tells us she just missed him getting off the bus and when we looked out the trash barrels were upended. As if to see were to give over the wild in us. As antidote we tell her, bring a kazoo with you to the bus stop. Thing we know well enough to scale up the hill of it. Us on our feet standing, yes nose, yes eyes. Down from wooded promontories or slight up the hill to this small place. A skinned ear for distance. Skin of, I can't outrun him. No. But what of another life? The one into which each might be born. One in which no one runs or is outrun and no one slaughtered. World in which no one needs say. Show him you have eyes. So, since it's a writing program we get to say I really thought I was writing about the bus stop. But does anybody think I might have been writing about something else? So it turns out after I finished this, this poem, three years after Sandy Hook was the poem that made me realize that all the wild animals in the woods represented for me threats that had to do with the fact that the children at Sandy Hook said wild animal, wild animal, wild animal to explain to themselves what had happened as they left the school. Which I felt was an incredibly generous thought and true. So it's that punch in the gut that some of your teachers might be warning you about or you get to the last line before you realize that something really hard has been happening. So I'm just gonna read this one more time because it helped me understand the thematic unity. Sort of it's the aquarium. The bear is the aquarium in this book. So, and being made of the same thing as the bear was like very liberating for me to own the violence that is all of us. And to maybe think about it as something. Something that we all are with just like the bear. On slaughter and praying. Let me slight up the hill of it. See enough to know. Say I know you well enough. Say into the ear of its marrow distance, yes. Yellow for eyes, yes, nose, kin to mine. Let me slight my faded ashy, read like in winter. The end is ugly, I know. The end is not, but it wanted. Up the hill of it into something resembling knowledge. The small girl tells us she just missed him getting off the bus. And when we looked, the trash barrels were upended. As if to see were to give over the wild in us. As antidote we tell her, bring a kazoo with you to the bus stop. Thing we know well enough to scale up the hill of it. Us on our feet standing, yes, nose, yes, eyes. Down from wooded promontories or slight up the hill to this small place. A skinned ear for distance, skin of I can't outrun him, no. But what of another life, the one into which each might be born, one in which no one runs or is outrun and no one slaughtered. World in which no one needs say. Show him you have eyes. That's the introductory material of this book. I'm working as well as I can with, I think, material I, I'm just not a thematic poet. So it's been pretty hard. Lyric poets just go from one subject to the next. So it's been hard to work with one subject. This is called on devotion. What if one day you asked to enter its mystery and vulnerable in wind, you needed to find something you couldn't and what helped you also helped the sun go quickly behind trees. What if you held thin in the lungs a half life of this window or that and much of what you knew you held close though dissolution was certain, predetermined, be careful, the poem says, threatening now. But with what, ash already inside of you? Think of it, some level devotions required, some sense of the ongoingness of things until it's not worth talking about. I found you under the melting tree, but maybe that's wrong and it's your melting tree from inside the wall garden I called. Yours to melt in meander, spring words piling up around the winter ones. What forest could you follow towards or lead out of, child lost in woods? No one owns such children but chance. The melody no longer if ever discernable but what does it tell us anyway? Be careful the poem again, brotherly now. It's ashes new scattered. It's birds eyeball shrouded in invisibility. The flinching disaster of elegy, its rising star. You kept it near you, the vein under the eye and one day you asked to enter its mystery, the blue-black truth of it, its lung full of air, its underbelly purple as living blood. Man of war you recognized it as a child with a stick, you grazed it. You were the one with the stick, a reed really in your hand. You with the desire to know, be careful the poem says but gives no certain way beyond guessing. What goes under and what likewise surfaces? Leaves its trace on the shore, ashes moving into the next moment. Blank of memory devoid of all but observation. Be careful the poem says don't feel so much. Brick by brick on the dismantling of Sandy Hook School. Brick by brick will you be taken as first you were one to the next by hand, the level of bubble between you and the world. Where you've been raised brick by brick, now you'll no longer do what you had done. Listener to song or story backdrop to watercolor masterpieces. Where once you were sunwashed, backrest at playtime. Now brick by brick you fall away. Are carried to where you become ash, dust, the particle that catches in the throat. Phrase fouled in the singing. Brick by brick to be undone, unmixed, unmoored. Near where the stream announces your pure removal and the trees undo all that was perfect in summer. Their leaves yellow and red move to fall at the feet of your disappearing. Your shadow through trees, red blue play sets whose outline slept at nap time. Your windows like eyes closed all these months of what was once noisy, perfect, and right. You're the last to be counted, touched, retired from use as you were the first hand mixed in ratio of water to matter. And given the color you kept. Now workers in their boots having kissed their children on top of heads, having put on their bright yellow hats. Even these big men approached slowly your house of shadows. Your last scene with the eye rooms where some were taken, others given back. By hand brick by brick all solemnly agree you are to be carried and crushed, pulverized, melted down and buried in secret. Perhaps like the good thief who in asking to be killed elsewhere made himself worthy of Christ, you will spirit yourself into some other shape of praise. A song even mothers grow to love. Not these bricks gone by the anniversary as if matter could disappear upon request. Instead of as it has this year without reason or warning. Once a true child's hand traced the enormities that swirled inside of you. Understood by touch the enormous inside of him. And was perhaps comforted by the certainty of you. Even then, even that day. So in the heartless way of books, this book is about me and my boys and not really any of those things I mentioned. Anybody who's written the elegy has had the experience of having it not be about the person that they're praising, but your own one day in world. And so throughout this book is really a lot of love poems to my boys, which I hope is comforting to you. It's comforting to me, so this is one of those. It's called What You Already Know. Most days you're the child of unknowing and I'm an open hand. That seems to say you come from a long line of but doesn't finish. Or you're not mine, but Memling's boy. 500 years old if a day. Holding hand over heart and tipping his wings toward gold leaf as if made to find. As if made of such an earnest immortality. I never could myself make. Or you're not lost, found, or floating in a painting but born into the glancing light of your September. And I'm made of nothing you could trace with your hand or get back to if called. As in the mirror you double-eye me from the bevel. So momentarily I know more than distortion. And maybe that's more true than not. Don't think I didn't, don't notice. The days dwindle when you ask me to work the sink. Talk to me in serious tones about a damp that soaks the knees. Bring to me an ambient worry over living things that has you wondering what Brownhouse thinks now that we're gone. It feels like basic sorrow but you name it tidal. This language that flows away with your years. The busy fish in the pond or the thousand eyes of clouds you've named, you've named them all. Each one different though you don't play favorites. And I almost explained the flat privacy of it. How language is always an empty room except you tell me first. Then head off to the stop-start of the school bus where something else takes you with it near but far. And I stay thinking maybe you'll hinge back or by some apparatus unknown as prayer I'll move into your orbit. Your mind of feathers, the long trail back unwinding itself new. As a word we both find to mean one thing then another. I don't have to explain how once I was a blade of unwanted grass in the Mesozoic era. You a patchwork of rumors, the spirit hit its hinge inside. I a body's edge and you a wingspan born. I don't explain you're growing the large and small of it. You're calling to me imperceptibly less. Why explain what you already know? So then after what seems like a long time of going back and forth between poems and essays, I end up on an essay about Picasso and the MoMA sculpture exhibits. And it's perplexing to me still why I end up with Picasso. The closest I can get to is he's like the super complicated art maker inside war. I don't know because like he made things in Paris during occupied during World War II. But I'm still working that out, but Sisu comes back in this. And when I wrote this, one of my readers read this essay. She's read a lot of my work and she said, I think you just finished writing about this. And I was like please let tell me that I'm done writing about Sandy Hooker. So perhaps fitting this section, I'm gonna read you the eighth and ninth sections of this essay that closes the book. And it's called the section eight is and speaking of bondage. So I'm trapped inside this form, trapped inside these poems and speaking of bondage. I have left this part of the essay to sleep and awoken with another strange Sisu transliteration, my words from her world. In my dreams also Picasso's bird and another sculpture called Death's Head, which I can't find the door to approach yet. Instead my own words on a scrap of paper. You are tired of holes bubbling up through wounds of ponds eyed with white. The work of knowing the foreign in me leads incrementally to loving more of the world. I know, but where do I end in the world begin? Sisu's answer, one of many. I am the finite that wants the infinite. Love infinites me. Without you I am a pebble and my skin closes narrowly over me. One gallery note provides the information that five of Picasso's wooden figures, four called standing woman and one seated woman, each narrow, each 18 inches tall, all in a case together, are made of fur. Some taken from the backs of stretchers, some foraged from the forest floor. This is perhaps my favorite moment of gloss on the exhibition walls. I much prefer the year, the place, and the list of materials. Here the list of materials itself opens a door. Some are the backs of stretchers, some have been foraged from the forest floor, the tenderness of it, the lineage of woods. Sisu again pertaining to what can be achieved in a life dedicated to circumferential confession and to searching. Then under the shock of incredulity, one tries out circumfession, the attempt to make oneself spit out the most secret blood so as to try to see with one's own eyes its interior color of what? Of one's own spirit, the personal juice of life, the inner proof of the existence of self. Picasso's interior color, fur, foraged from the forest floor. Sand partially painted, inner proof of the existence of self. Part nine, antlers. We've had antlers so I was like wanting to end on antlers. Eventually we are no longer trapped. We are momentarily free. This is both comforting and terrifying. At the bus stop where no one has been mauled by a bear, I wait for my youngest son. At the bus stop where no one has been mauled by a bear, I wait for my youngest son. And a high school boy comes walking up from the far end of the cul-de-sac. The high school kids get out early and he is in charge of his dogs. Behind the cul-de-sac are a pump station and a path into wild woods past a vineyard to the river. He has been walking his blue-tick hound in his Irish setter. For a moment that all three are wild, something of their most secret blood is still visible. I am the first human he has seen. I am part of his reluctant return and also part of his foreignness. In his hand he has one half of a rack of antlers of what was once a 10-point buck. We both marvel at it. It is extraordinary. We try to imagine the breadth of it. It's span when mounted on the living head. He points out the chip on a lower point where something small has tried to move the body of the buck and failed. Time collapses. Living and dead change places. I'm wild now. We are. We're the mystery. Love impenets us. I don't tell him about Picasso's famous bike seat bull with handlebar horns, bull's head. Mounted in triumph at Mama, but hidden in a bathroom in Paris all through the war years. I don't tell him about death's head rising up in bronze from a nearby white table and resembling a burn victim. Its face frozen and its nose collapsed. Secreted by Picasso to the Foundry in the dead of night. To be fired lest the occupying Nazis find him practicing his art. The ultimate interior act made exterior one that could cost him his life. I don't approach the war years with the boy because I am not totally free and I can see he may yet be. He tells me that tomorrow he will go back and look for the antlers other half, restore to the beast his crown. Because if he doesn't the day after that, a covering snow is coming to bury it. The idea, it's one of those things. Like it's swallowed me for a really long time. He also, like something I've been saying a lot lately with the health and needs. Another thing he said is, he was a writer before him. So there are books from before the war and then the poems that were on the body. So he's like, you know, this is a great figure. And in his earlier work he said, why do I write what else am I doing? Poetry, cat's nail, dog's hat. It's like we're done here. You know, like, you know, yeah. So it makes me a cat to fulfill my function. That's a try. Yeah, it does. You mentioned a non-proficient poetry. Yeah, I just, the first time I heard about that. I said that, the first time I said that. So, but I guess I'm saying I'm making a choice to try to, like, I'm not trying, I'm not trying, I'm trying to imagine toward what it is to be truthful and honest. I mean, I don't think it's completely captured. I don't think it's ever been to truth, but I do think poetry is on the non-proficient side. I think it's one way to non-fiction and poetry tends to be closer. Like, the reason people try one or the other, you know, it's the same enterprise, I think. It's just kind of working forward for something. And I think fiction isn't also different. I mean, you're probably saying it's in the magnetic world where you're trying to get at a truth. So I don't know that fiction isn't included, but I think poetry, I'm thinking of it in my self-past, an act of time to get to it. I apologize. It's weird being back behind you. Lone? Well, I mean, one of them recently was like, you're not allowed to write about me. And the other one's like, it's how she makes her money. So just... Which is not true, really, at all, because it actually doesn't matter a stitch what I write about as far as being paid to be a professor, I'd like, you know. But like, in fact, some people might pay me not to write, you know, like, it's farm subsidies for not growing corn or whatever, but like, but I don't, my older boy is gonna proof this book this summer. And because he found out one of his friends had a paying job, so I, you know, had to pay him to be my personal assistant. So, but I mean, and he reads them and he'll be like, wow, you're really, you're getting a lot clearer. It's mostly like, like criticism that's like, gee, you know, that one is, you know. And he'll be like, you're gonna explain that before you read it or whatever. Yeah, so. The younger one will sit on my lap while I'm working and I will read something to him and then he'll like go and get a sheet of paper and start drawing in the quiet like space that, you know, is made by my working. But yeah, but beyond just, it's like he doesn't want me to take any of his pictures either. So it's like that. But I don't know how they're gonna feel and I honestly did not work out those ethical considerations. And I was writing about them way before Sandy Hook, like, you know, they're my whole subject from the beginning and I don't know how they're gonna feel in their teen years. I'll let you know to be determined. Anyone else? Anything else? Yes? Yeah. You're right. So the bus stop poem is later. And it, I think, is clearer. Because it's always toward clarity, one hopes. I mean, you don't wanna go toward obscurity, your whole career. That leads to not. So like, did you think it was a clearer poem than the other poems? No, it's not. The language. Yeah. Yeah, I think that like, well, Ashbury said, John Ashbury said something like, you know, poets, there's a river of language and poets are just like getting a cup of it and pouring it out on the desk. And it's always flowing, but it's flowing. And so it's different all the time. So it's nice to know there's a change in my ear or whatever, like all of our cells regenerate. You know, why wouldn't our ear be different two years from, so yeah. Yes. Yeah, I mean, the poems are chronological really inside the book. And the chronology is like an essay accompanying a set of poems and then another essay accompanying another set of poems like that. And the book is the event, the aftermath and the anniversary. That poem is part of the front matter because it frames the thematic idea of the bear and the bus stop. Which I hope you saw, like I'm hoping because I've never read all this together, that you saw that those last two sections also deal with the bear and the bus stop and wild things at the bus stop. But now the wild thing is a beautiful thing that isn't hurting anyone. Well, it's just a thematically unified book. One hopes. The hope would be that that antler section feels good. You'll have to tell me, but like, there's some peace there. And that, so it moves from like difficulty into some kind of acceptance. So in that way, it has that arc that fiction has which is like conflict and resolution. But I mean, hopefully not because of the subject is so difficult, it would not be a simple resolution. But the nice pretty thing happens at the end. Somebody buries something. I don't know, I'm talking really simply about it, but that's the idea. You know, and these are the concerns. It's actually kind of interesting we're gonna have that panel on managing the mess because this is really what I'm talking about, managing the mess. And surrendering to the fact that this book has to have this content that I'm not comfortable with. That's a big thing. And then embracing that and using my organizational ability to make it as palatable as possible. Well, thank you all for being my first witness.